To fly with several airlines on one booking can become a real mess. Tomorrow I will start my two week vacation to Hanoi and Halong (more post to come). Because I used Eurobonus points I booked with SAS but fly with Lufthansa and Turkish.
This should not be a problem, al of the airlines are members of Star Alliance and the tickets are confirmed. However flying with several airlines is not as seamless as it could be. My flight scheduele starts at 0635 tomorrow with a Lufthansa flight down to Istanbul over Frankfurt. In Istanbul we will have a 13 hours layover before we continue to Hanoi with Turkish Airlines. But my problem started when I checked in this morning and found out that I was just getting 5 boarding passes instead of 6. On no way could I get a boarding pass for my husbands third leg.
Turkish airline
To find someone that could solve this and explain why I did but not him was the start of an interesting customer journey. One of the problem with flying with several airlines is that they don’t use the same booking reference. So I called SAS and did get a booking reference for my Turkish airline flights. Then I called Turkish to get my husband seated close to me. The could neither seat him or explain why I did get a seat and not him. According to them, it was a mistake that I got one because we have flights with Lufthansa before. As that should effect my seating on Turkish.
Lufthansa
I then called Lufthansa who could see al flights but not seat us on Turkish. Neither could they understand why just one of us got a seat. The only answer they could give was that I would need to solve it at check in tomorrow. Very friendly but to no help…
SAS
I then went to Turkish homepage to find out that it’s not enough to have a booking reference, you also need the ticket number. The SAS ticketnumber starting with 117-xxxxxxxxxxx did not work. So back to SAS callcenter trying to get another ticket number. According to SAS the ticket number is al the same thru the journey, and they confirmed that our tickets was confirmed. So no help….
Several airlines, nobodies responsibility
My lesson from this is that when something don’t work out well, nobody is on your side. Al airlines I spoked to is extremely friendly. But no, they cant help me and it’s not their fault. So I will need to fix it tomorrow. But I know I’m not the most happy person at 4 am so I hope the answer wont be, solve it at Istanbul. But it would not surprise me. But still, I do like Star Alliance and my Eurobonus Gold makes my journeys so much easier. It would take to much time and money to get the same status on another alliance.
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